Photograph Works

  • WordPress.com Becomes Home.blog

    A funny thing happened when I started what I thought was going to be a standard setup of a new WordPress blog. I expected it would be in the usual style of something dot wordpress dot com.

    I started and chose the name Pangolin, and I could see that for the free option the URL would be https://pangolin.home.blog

    Now I know that Automattic (the company that owns WordPress.com) bought the top level .blog domain a couple of years ago, but I never expected they would be using it to direct everything away from using the word WordPress on the front end. 

    As I continued I could see that in the back end the URL was pangolinhome.wordpress.com.

    Try typing that into the browser and you will it change to pangolin.home.blog

    Is this just something they are experimenting with, or is it a permanent change for WordPress.com?

    Follow-Up

    I wondered what home.blog was, so I went visiting. It is the website of A3 – Appalachia + AGI + Automattic and in the About page it says:

    Project A3 Goals

    Building upon the ethos of WordPress — the open and collaborative technology platform co-founded in 2003 by Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg at the age of 19 — Alliance Graphique Internationale design legends Marian Bantjes, Michael Bierut, Minchaya Chayosumrit, Yung-Chen Nieh, Alejandro Paul, Taku Satoh, Eddie Opara, Nancy Skolos have created visual designs for the web together with high school students in Paintsville, Kentucky and digital designers at Automattic in an all-remote collaboration that spans the world. The one-of-kind visual designs crafted by the AGI designers center around themes that include Home, Art, Photo, Science, Code, Poetry, Water, and Music as presented on the dedicated websites Home.blog, Art.blog, Photo.blog, Science.blog, Code.blog, Poetry.blog, Water.blog, Music.blog as permanent symbols on the Internet of digital creativity. From these websites, anyone can create a blog as a free subdomain like: laura.science.blog or philippe.code.blog, etc.

    (My emphasis – text made bold)

    At the bottom of the page it said to click to start a home.blog so I clicked to start a blog and found myself back where I was when I had started hours earlier to create a new blog.

    Only this time as I was going through the process I clicked on ‘alternative -something or other’ (can’t recall exactly what it said) and I typed in some vaguely random words. And before I knew it I had created SearchDotPress which is searchdotpress dot wordpress dot com

    So by accident I had managed to make a site with an address that was wordpress dot com rather than something or other dot blog.

    This is getting out of hand and about as confusing as heck.

  • Cows On Midsummer Common

    Closeup of cow on Midsummer Common

    If you have looked at my photos of the cows on Midsummer Common here in Cambridge, you probably don’t realise how close to the houses the cows can be. So this is to correct that.

    Of course, I didn’t shoo the cows over there. They just happened to be at this side of the Common. I singled this one out because it caught the rays of the sun so well. That chestnut brown is wonderful, isn’t it.

    In case you think this is way out in the countryside, this is less than 500 yards as the crow flies from the centre of Cambridge.

    Cow on Midsummer Common

    Newsletter

    I signed up to Revue. The home page of Revue says it “is an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers.”

    I am, in the vernacular of British English, ‘giving it a go’.

    To give something a go means to try something without high hopes of success or attachment to the result. It is a way of disarming the risk of failure.

    My aim is to build a huge following – for what purpose? It might help to first have a purpose (beyond the adulation of the masses).

    That’s for the bright future. For now I would like to get a few subscribers for David’s Satisfying Newsletter, so if you are in the mood…

    Click here to sign up

  • Age Cannot Wither Her

    Open chrysanthemum flower with bud next to it

    Snapping photos with my compact camera as I walked along the street, I came upon this chrysanthemum. It and its neighbour were the only flowers in a scrappy flower bed, hard up against the wall of a building, a little golden beauty.

    I saw the raggedy edges of the outer petals with the flower past its prime. And I thought how lovely the flower was, raggedy edges or not.

    Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety

    Said by Enobarbus about Cleopatra and her infinitely interesting character and moods, in Shakespeare’s Antony And Cleopatra Act 2, scene 2

    And here is the neighbouring flower:

    chrysanthemum flower